'Asteroid Day' to Raise Awareness of Space Rock Threat

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SAN FRANCISCO — Humanity can dramatically reduce its frightening
vulnerability to cataclysmic asteroid strikes with just a little
extra funding and a little extra effort.

That's the main message of "Asteroid Day," an educational
campaign that launched today (Dec. 3) at a joint news conference
held both here at the California Academy of Sciences and in
London. Asteroid Day aims to raise awareness of the threats posed
by space rocks and eventually help boost the rate of near-Earth
asteroid discovery by a factor of 100.

"We need all nations to cooperate," said astrophysicist Brian
May, who is also a founding member and lead guitarist of the rock
band Queen. "This is not just an American problem or a British
problem; this is a world problem which is avertable. That's our
message." [ Potentially
Dangerous Asteroids (Images) ]

The campaign wants the world to mark Asteroid Day on June 30,
2015, the 107th anniversary of the " Tunguska
event." On June 30, 1908, a near-Earth object (NEO) thought
to be about 130 feet (40 meters) wide exploded above the
Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, destroying 800 square
miles (2,072 square kilometers) of forest.

"If that event had taken place 6 1/2 hours later, Berlin would
have rotated into the object's path, and that would have utterly
changed the course of human civilization," said Bill Nye, former
TV "Science Guy" and CEO of the nonprofit Planetary Society, who
joined today's news conference via videoconference from New York.

A series of events organized by individuals and groups around the
world will take place on June 30 of next year to mark the
anniversary, Asteroid Day organizers said.

Humanity has the know-how to prevent another Tunguska,
researchers say: Threatening
asteroids can be sped up or slowed down slightly, causing
them to miss the planet.

The ideal
deflection campaign would send one robotic "observer" probe
out to rendezvous with the space rock and then a "kinetic
impactor" craft to slam into the asteroid, said former Apollo
astronaut Rusty Schweickart, co-founder and chair emeritus of the
nonprofit B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to preventing
catastrophic asteroid impacts. (The foundation is developing an
asteroid-hunting
space telescope called Sentinel, which may launch in 2018 or
2019.)

The observer spacecraft would confirm and note the effects of the
deep-space collision and, if necessary, further change the
asteroid's velocity by flying alongside it and exerting a tiny
gravitational tug.

But this strategy can only work with a great deal of lead time —
perhaps about 20 years ahead of the potential Earth impact,
Schweickart said. Therefore, it's imperative to find hazardous
objects early — another big message of the Asteroid Day campaign.

There's a lot of work to do on this front. NASA has found more
than 95 percent of the really big NEOs out there — rocks at least
0.6 miles (1 km) wide, which could threaten human civilization if
they hit Earth — and none of them poses a risk for the
foreseeable future. But there are probably about 1 million NEOs
comparable in size to the one that caused the Tunguska event, and
less than 1 percent of them have been spotted, Schweickart said.

He and other Asteroid Day organizers hope the campaign results in
more money being funneled into the detection effort, leading to
the 100-fold increase in the asteroid discovery rate. Currently,
governments around the world spend $40 million to $50 million per
year toward this end, and scientists find about 1,000 NEOs
annually, said B612 co-founder and CEO Ed Lu, a former NASA
astronaut.

"Let's do 100 times better than we're doing now at finding these
asteroids," Lu said. "That will give us a fighting chance. That
will be what allows us to be smarter than the dinosaurs."

Scientists think the dinosaurs were wiped out when a 6-mile-wide
(10 km) asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago.